Boreal

Dead Girl Walking

French court convicts 11 people of cyberbullying teen who criticized Islam in online posts. Globe and Mail, July 8, 2021

At 16, Mila posted to her Instagram account that she preferred women to men. The young atheist appears to have had enough of being told that Allah did not approve, with all that entails, when she responded with a video telling her critics what she thought about Islam and the Koran adding, for good measure, that she would like to give God the equivalent of a prostate exam (my translation):

I hate religion… in the Koran there is only hatred, Islam is a piece of shit… I have said what I think; you are not going to hold that against me? There are people who are going to get all excited. I don’t care, I say what I want, what is on my mind. Your religion is a piece of shit. Your god, I stick a finger up his ass, thank you, goodbye.

RTBF (Belgium public broadcaster)

Her video went viral. She was immediately flooded with threats to her life and wellbeing. According to L’OBS (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur) she may have received up to 100,000 messages “threatening her with rape, beheading, burning her with acid…“

Teenaged boys of her generation did not spare her. No surprise there! In a television interview, even with police protection, the now 18 years old teenager said she expected to be murdered before her 23rd birthday. The inevitable may occur sooner rather than later brave Mila. Your age, when you said those words, will not save you from those who take their cue from the Prophet of Mercy.

 Charlie Hebdo’s Response

Charlie Hebdo, where in 2015 twelve cartoonists and staff were shot to death and eleven injured in retaliation for publishing mostly innocent cartoons of Muhammad, came to the defence of Mila. The satirical magazine started off by stating the obvious: “inserting a finger in the divine posterior is not meant to be taken literally, God remaining unlocatable so does his asshole.”

The magazine then proceeded to quote famous authors such as Antonin Artaud who wrote that “If God really does exist, He is a piece of shit.” In the novel The Marquis’ de Sade the character Vespoli fantasizes about sodomising the Almighty while doing the same to a boy in an insane asylum who claims to be God. In Les Chants de Maldoror, the magazine informs us, the author has “humans defecating on the face of a sprawling dead drunk God.” The defense ends with a quote from Georges Bataille who asked himself if “God could possibly be a prostitute, a crazy person, even a pig.”

I would add Not Wanted on the Voyage by Canadian Timothy Findley. In his retelling of the story of the Flood, God is a vindictive, doddering old fool, Noah a tyrant and, in the immemorial battle between the armies of the Archangel Michael and those of Lucifer, the good guys lost. You cannot get more blasphemous than that. Findley died a celebrated author (Governor General’s Award, Order of Canada…) of natural causes at the age of 71. But that was a different a time, a time before the embodiment of the thin-skinned religion became a force to be reckoned with in the West.

For the hypersensitive believers, the teenager had gone too far; much too far. Her video was blasted as a call to hatred. Mila’s response:

Unlike them, I did not insult anyone, threaten or call for violence against anyone. What I did was blasphemy; it is a general criticism of religions, and nothing other.

She later admitted to regretting the "vulgarity" of her statements which became the subject of an investigation for "inciting hatred towards a group of people, because of their belonging to a race or a specific religion." The investigation was quickly dropped.

Her apology will make no difference to those who want her maimed or dead for wanting to do the impossible, and they have the example of Muhammad who never forgave two girls who, as children, made fun of him in songs.

She knows she is being stalked: “The stalkers brag about imprisoning me in my own country, locked up like a rat.” In a TV interview she admitted it was only a matter of time before she was murdered for her remarks.

You would think her stalkers would cut her some slack knowing what God will do to her when He get His hands on her.

Bernard Payeur

July 14, 2021